Bluesky announces $100M Series B after CEO transition

Social web Bluesky is gearing up for large changes with today’s quality that the institution raised $100 cardinal successful Series B funding. The round, led by Bain Capital Crypto, was closed successful April 2025 but had not been disclosed until now.

Others that participated successful the circular see existing investors Alumni Ventures and True Ventures, positive Anthos Capital, Bloomberg Beta, and Knight Foundation. This circular follows Bluesky’s $15 cardinal Series A, led by Blockchain Capital, closed successful 2024, and its $8 cardinal effect round from Neo and different angel investors the twelvemonth prior. Bluesky did not disclose its updated valuation.

The backing quality has been strategically shared the week aft Bluesky CEO Jay Graber announced she was stepping down from the pb relation and transitioning to go Chief Innovation Officer. The determination had signaled some Graber’s tendency to instrumentality to gathering arsenic good arsenic the request for the institution to prosecute a main enforcement who could thrust Bluesky guardant to commercialized success.

Since its Series A, Bluesky has seen accelerated maturation from 13 cardinal to, now, implicit 43 cardinal planetary users. Its ecosystem of apps that enactment connected the AT protocol (also known arsenic atproto) and interoperate with 1 different has besides grown, from startups similar the video app Skylight oregon Instagram alternate Flashes to larger companies similar Flipboard, which has been gathering an unfastened societal app, Surf. New communities person besides sprung up, similar Blacksky, which supports Black societal media users.

The summation of different crypto-oriented VC steadfast whitethorn springiness immoderate Bluesky users pause, however, particularly since, truthful far, the institution has not integrated cryptocurrencies into its offering. Bluesky isn’t built connected blockchain technology, either. Still, erstwhile CEO Graber’s earlier enactment with the cryptocurrency Zcash helped animate the societal network’s decentralized design, which has appealed to investors successful the crypto space.

As Graber erstwhile told Wired successful an interview, “the word Web3 got precise associated with cryptocurrency, truthful it’s not a bully connection to usage for what we’re doing. But if you deliberation astir Web3 arsenic evolving the societal Web 2.0, that benignant of is what we’re doing. We’re evolving societal media that was based successful centralized companies into thing that is unfastened and distributed,” she said past spring.

The further funds person been utilized to standard Bluesky’s team, portion the institution continues to make Bluesky’s app and the underlying atproto that powers it. This exertion present powers a scope of apps successful the larger unfastened societal ecosystem known arsenic the Atmosphere — a web that present contains astir 20 cardinal nationalist records, including posts, likes, comments, and different interactions, the institution said connected Thursday.

In addition, the fig of developers gathering connected atproto is growing, arsenic evidenced by the implicit 400,000 downloads of developer tools (SDK) seen each month. Plus, Bluesky says that radical usage implicit a 1000 apps built connected atproto each week.